Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira

subscribe to the fantasies and fancies that the imagination of local historians shaped) (1946: 276). An elusive yet key concept of Spanish colonial discourses on Galicia was being consolidated, which linked the myth of Celtic origins to a lack of morals and decency that was most disturbingly displayed by the female members of the population.

      Indeed, images of sexually active Galician female peasants were not infrequent in late nineteenth-century Galician popular prose and poetry. As anthropological studies such as Allyson Poska’s Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain (2005) have neatly demonstrated, the lives of Galician peasant women since the early modern period and up until recently were not determined by the culture of sexual honour that permeated other parts of the Iberian Peninsula, mostly on account of a combination of distinct legal traditions that empowered women’s authority in the household and a history of massive male migration, which left peasant women the full responsibility of house and land management, as well as child care. At the level of cultural representation, such historical conditionings were partly to account for the images of women as unconcerned with restrictive moral codes, images that appear in profusion in the early Galician-language texts of the Rexurdimento, the Galician literary revival in the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, the Galician-language poems of Benito Losada or the novels of Xesús Rodríguez López are populated with sexually active single women, pregnant servants and adulterous wives. Worryingly, as we shall see, for early theorists of the language’s role in Galician regionalism, such as Eugenio Carré Aldao, Galician was fast becoming the preferred vehicle for a literature of sexual mischief and innuendo, in which women played a far from submissive role. This was a problem for a nationalist movement that was at a crucially formative stage of its political development. As has been argued in feminist approaches to nationalisms, women in colonial nations have been expected to ‘uphold standards of “civilized” respectability’, thus turning the question of women’s sexual propriety into a central national concern (Day and Thompson, 2004: 109). It is therefore not surprising that positions antagonistic to the construction of a robust Galician nationalist discourse seized upon these images and presented them as a debilitating national trope within a moralistic frame for national construction. Leopoldo Pedreira’s anti-regionalist texts, for example, include references to how ‘el pueblo gallego no da importancia á la virginidad de la mujer’ (Galician people do not grant importance to women’s virginity) (1894: 161). The novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán, particularly those linked to Galician rural life and settings, as in Los pazos de Ulloa (The Houses of Ulloa) (1886), are interspersed with references to Galician female peasants or servants as sexually ‘irresponsible’.⁴ By 1916, when the Galician conservative politician Augusto González Besada selected the theme of Galician women as the topic of his acceptance speech at the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy), it is evident that the ‘Galician woman question’ had turned into a contested zone for discourses on the nation competing to be regarded as representative in Spain and Galicia. I shall analyse González Besada’s speech in more detail in the next chapter, but I would like here to dwell on the seldom discussed link between sexualized representations of Galician rural women and the discourse of Galician celtismo.

      Just as the myth of Celtic origins had supplied the metaphors for centralist/colonialist representations of Galician identity as humble, sentimental and inactive, a parallel discursive mutation was developing apace that conceived of Galician rural women in terms of a sexualized colonial fantasy. For the network of interacting discourses of the nation developing in Galicia and Spain in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, this meant that, while Galician nationalism was invested in the political and social mobilization of women partially through a Celticist discourse that depicted them as valiant and sturdy, centralist/colonialist narratives on Galicia were working towards a different characterization, one geared towards the weakening of the nascent Galician nationalist movement through a most effective assault: the questioning of its women’s decency. In the past two decades, a solid body of feminist work on nationalisms has shown how ‘[w]omen especially are often required to carry this “burden of representation”, as they are constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour, both personally and collectively’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 45). In the logic of patriarchal nation-building projects, women’s decency and honour has been the subject of a particularly protective order. For the Galician context, this has had far-reaching implications. The proliferation during the first decades of the twentieth century of popular narratives on Galicia written for a Spanish readership can be taken as an example of the kind of texts aiming to subvert such order. Novels such as Wenceslao Fernández Flórez’s Volvoreta (Butterfly) or Rafael López de Haro’s Los nietos de los celtas (The Grandchildren of the Celts), both published in 1917, serve as cases in point. Both novels exploit the romantic plot between a Galician rural girl and a male protagonist who either is not Galician or has returned to the region after a long spell abroad. It is the female characters, however, and, crucially, their sexual attitudes and behaviours that act in both novels as the motivating argument, with the male protagonists’ perplexed reactions functioning as manifestations of normative identity. In Fernández Flórez’s novel, Federica goes by the name of ‘Volvoreta’ (Galician for ‘butterfly’) for the reason that she ‘[t]enía muchos novios … Á lo mejor, tres á un tiempo’ (had several boyfriends … sometimes three at a time) (1917: 51). Sergio’s jealousy is incited throughout the novel by Federica’s reluctance to censure what appear as the lax sexual mores of her rural environment, which are described from the young man’s unsettled perspective as ‘un drama bestial’ (a bestial drama) (1917: 105). What remains in the realm of suggestion and allusiveness in Fernández Flórez’s novel is spelt out more clearly in López de Haro’s Los nietos de los celtas. Here, depictions of Galician rural women are almost always sexualized, even when they are described as ‘mujer[es] recia[s] con los huesos sólidamente ensamblados’ (tough women with a robust bone structure) (López de Haro, 1917: 68), and thus not conforming to the metropolitan canon of feminine beauty. More importantly, the text is replete with references to Galician rural lifestyles as permeated by a sexual permissiveness that is classed as either atavistic or plain immoral. Single motherhood is described as rife in the Galician countryside, and met with ‘una indulgencia plenaria’ (plenary indulgence) by its society (1917: 80). Popular celebrations such as the fiada, based on a group’s singing and dancing around the spinning of linen, are depicted as ‘una tertulia en promiscuidad donde se bebe, se baila y se retoza’ (a gathering of promiscuity, where they drink, dance and frolic) (52). The association between such customs and the Galicians’ Celtic origins is made explicit from the book’s title, of course, but also in the frequent references to characters as ‘uno de tantos documentos vivos en que pueden apoyar sus asertos los partidarios de la teoría céltica, en lo atañadero a los probables aborígenes de Galicia’ (one of the many living documents that provide backing for the supporters of the Celtic theory, as regards the probable original inhabitants of Galicia) (71). As one of the novel’s main aims was, as acknowledged by the author in the prologue, ‘ensayar un psicoanálisis de los elementos ancestrales del alma de la mujer gallega’ (to attempt a psychoanalysis of the ancestral features of the soul of Galician women) (1917: 8), the link between Galicia’s Celtic origins and the characteristic proneness to promiscuity of its women is turned into a central leitmotif.

      The process of turning Galician women into national embodiments of abnegation and virtue was, therefore, a circuitous one for the nascent nationalist movement in Galicia. A crucial discursive struggle was taking place between those positions presenting Galician women as both the bearers and the essence of national legitimacy and, conversely, those which described them in ways that could prove demeaning for the national cause. One text produced in the context of Galician emerging nationalism stands out for its overt engagement with this struggle: Francisca Herrera Garrido’s article ‘A muller galega’ (‘Galician women’). The article was first drafted, as the author said, in 1916, but she then made a series of additions to it before it went to print as a contribution to the Ourense-based nationalist magazine Nós (Ourselves), in 1921. Herrera’s article can and has been read as a paean to Galician women from a staunchly conservative, anti-feminist perspective (Blanco, 1986). Yet the additions that Herrera made to it before publication turn the text also into a document responding to the heated question of Galician women’s morality, and one that evinces